Leana Boven (b. 1993, Paramaribo) is a curator, programme maker, writer, and researcher with a background in gender- and postcolonial theory. Her work centers on counterculture, diasporic connectedness and the feeling of belonging, spatial justice, ecology and decolonial climate justice, and collective care.
Leana curated her first exhibition, On Collective Care & Togetherness, at MAMA in Rotterdam in 2020, and has since organized multiple exhibitions and programs. She worked as a curator at Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons for several years, and currently works as a curator at Stroom Den Haag, where she curated the exhibitions Positions: Soft Intimacies (2024) and Beloved Waters (2025). She is also a curator at Gemaal op Zuid in Rotterdam, where, together with Yusser al Obaidi, she organized the exhibition series Spiritual Disobedience (2025) and Love, Labour, Liberate (2024). Leana has taught at the Willem de Kooning Academy in the Social Practice department and is currently a tutor in Social Design at the Design Academy Eindhoven. In addition to her teaching, Leana regularly writes for platforms such as Metropolis M and is a board member at No Limits! Art Castle.
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Yusser al Obaidi
Yusser al Obaidi is a decolonial feminist researcher, writer and graphic designer who seeks to acknowledge and enable the radical potential of intimate relational spaces. She works with themes such as diasporic identity, oral histories, Sufi epistemology, modernity/coloniality, and the connection between micro and macro personal/political narratives. Her practice revolves around intimate forms of publishing and the mobilization of alternative knowledge circulation patterns for words that sit close to the skin. Her central concern: “How can we affirm other ways of being/knowing?”
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Az Oor
AZ OOR (MA) is a visual artist, storyteller, and poet from Rotterdam. An auto-proclaimed Amazigh Futurist, he advocates for a poetic resurgence of indigenous consciousness and thinking processes within the Developmentocene; a temporal, narrative, colonial, and terraforming sphere.
By contemplating and listening to events, orality, archival material, plants, bestialities, ethnographical sludge, viral thoughts, cinematic crufts, and literary figures, AZ OOR’s visual vernacular oscillates between quasi-theater forms, fragmented texts, and scenographic vocality. His work bridges speculative fiction and Indigenous praxis to articulate a living vocabulary for an Amazigh future that hasn’t yet happened and a nostalgia for something that didn’t exist.
Spiritual Disobedience #1 Al Falak Al Majdoub:
on wandering machines and song-maps of (no)return [الفلك المجذوب: رسائل في ال َمِكیَنات الھائمة وخرائط الـاـعودة النا ِغمة] by Az Oor
Defying time and space to allow pre-colonial Maghreb to visit us through a fragmentary
catalogue of prayers, noises, characters and stories, Gemaal op Zuid proudly presents Al Falak Al
Majdoub [The Entranced Orbit] as the first chapter of the exhibition series Spiritual Disobedience.
Rooted in Amazigh geography and the Maghreb as a site of participation in the World, and guided
by the words and absence of 16th-century Sufi and social reformist Sidi Abderhman El Majdoub,
we begin our journey.
The work unfolds as a tripartite gesture: a visual production (Wall Painting), a sound installation
(Electrical Wanderers), and a theory-fiction (Tales of the Electromancer). The constellation is a
proto-Sufipunk tale, envisioning a time and space where technology and worldbuilding emerge
from Quranic theurgy, Sufi-plural-cosmologies, and practices of reparation [Islah], reenchantment
[Tazkiyah], and everyday blessing [Baraka].
At its core, Al Falak Al Majdoub is a space-fiction exploring the theology of electricity, framing
Modernity itself as a theology of electricity, where the magic realm is reified into an economic
and capitalist infrastructure of power. The work travels the digital barzakh [liminal realm], where
cyber-utopias and colonial infrastructures collide. Al Falak Al Majdoub carves a parallel space of
survival for us to inhabit: a virtual Andalus where disenchanted worlds are reenchanted. It asks:
how to occupy digital realms without fracturing the Self?
Al Falak Al Majdoub: On wandering machines and song-maps of (no)return
[الفلك المجذوب: رسائل في المَكِينَات الهائِمة وخرائط الـاـعودة الناغِمة] by AZ OOR.
Defying time and space to allow pre-colonial Maghreb to visit us through a fragmentary catalogue of prayers, noises, characters and stories, Gemaal op Zuid proudly presents Al Falak Al Majdoub [The Entranced Orbit] as the first chapter of the exhibition series Spiritual Disobedience. Rooted in Amazigh geography and the Maghreb as a site of participation in the World, and guided by the words and absence of 16th-century Sufi and social reformist Sidi Abderhman El Majdoub, we begin our journey.
The work unfolds as a tripartite gesture: a visual production (Wall Painting), a sound installation (Electrical Wanderers), and a theory-fiction (Tales of the Electromancer). The constellation is a proto-Sufipunk tale, envisioning a time and space where technology and worldbuilding emerge from Quranic theurgy, Sufi-plural-cosmologies, and practices of reparation [Islah], reenchantment [Tazkiyah], and everyday blessing [Baraka].
At its core, Al Falak Al Majdoub is a space-fiction exploring the theology of electricity, framing Modernity itself as a theology of electricity, where the magic realm is reified into an economic and capitalist infrastructure of power. The work travels the digital barzakh [liminal realm], where cyber-utopias and colonial infrastructures collide. Al Falak Al Majdoub carves a parallel space of survival for us to inhabit: a virtual Andalus where disenchanted worlds are reenchanted. It asks: how to occupy digital realms without fracturing the Self?
GEMAAL OP ZUID
